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THE KING’S BUSINESS
ship of Molech in the valley of Hinnom. So gross was this worship and so awful were the things connected with it, that the New Testament word for hell, “Gehenna” (which means literally, the valley of Hin nom), is derived from the things con nected with this valley. Parents in their worship of Molech in this valley made their children pass through the fire; they were sometimes burned in the fire. Ahaz himself went to this awful extent in the prattice o.f this appalling form of idolatry (v. 3, cf. 2 Kings 16:3). When the chil dren of good men go" wrong there is no measuring the extent of depravity to which they will sink. It was for that v.ery prac tice that Jehovah had cast out the original inhabitants of the land before the children of Israel and now Ahaz carried the people back to this very form of idolatry that had proven so costly and so ruinous to the former inhabitants of the land. He prac ticed every conceivable form of false wor ship (v. 4), he was a “liberal” in religion, refusing t o ' be limited to the pure and “narrow” worship of Jehovah alone, but with the worship of Jehovah he combined other forms of worship, resulting from a study of comparative religions, as is done today by the theosophists. Indeed, Ahaz had quite a “congress of religions,”, and was doubtless considered a very broad man in comparison with the narrowness of his father and grandfather. The relig ion that was “good enough for father” was not good enough for him. v. 5. “Wherefore the LORD his God delivered him into the hand of the king of Syria; and they smote him, and carried away a great multitude of them captives (of his a great multitude of captives) and brought them to Damascus. And he was also delivered in to the hand of the king of Israel, who smote him with d great slaughter.” And while many of the people were doubtless pleased with the “liberality and breadth of view” of Ahaz, God was thoroughly displeased and gave Ahaz ©ver to judgment. The judgment of God was worked out through two separate agencies,
Judah but he himself was a thoroughly bad king. The sacred historian, in the sum mary of his misconduct, puts it mildly, “he did not that which was right in the sight of the LORD.” In point of fact he did that which was thoroughly wrong. But few kings of Judah went So far in evil as he did. vs. 2-4. “For ( But) he walked in the ways of the king of Israel, and made also molten images for Baalim. Moreover he burnt incense in the valley of the Son of Hinnom, and burnt his children in the fire, after the abominations of the heathen, whom the Lord had cast out before the children of Israel. He sacrificed also (And he sacrificed') and burnt incense in the high places, and on the hills, and under every green tree.” Instead of patterning his con duct after the good model set him, not only by David his remote ancestor, but by his own father, he patterned it after the thoroughly bad conduct of the kings of Israel. Although AHhz was ohly twenty years of age when he took the throne, even at that early age he entered on a course of action opposed to that by his father and his grandfather, Uzziah, and the general religious tendencies of his nation. There is a possibility that Uzziah, who had been disqualified for the kingship (Ch. 26:21) on account of his leprosy, which was the result of his transgression, was still alive, and a visible warning to Ahaz as the result of disobeying God. Ahaz’s first steji in the imitation of the wicked ways of the kings of Israel was in his causing to be made, and seemingly to be circulated throughout the land, images of the Baalim. Baalim is the plural of Baal. The worship of Baal had been brought intp Israel through the marriage of Ahab with Jeze bel (1 Kings 16:31) and into Judah through the marriage of Jtehoahaz, son of the good king Jehoshaphat, to a daughter of Jezebel (ch. 21:1-5). The whole thing is an illustration of the evil that follows for generations the marriage of the godly with the ungodly. Ahaz followed his first wrong step by reviving the heathen wor
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